How to cite a conference paper in APA 6
A paper presented at and published in conference proceedings. Previous APA edition — still required by some journals and older style guides.
Quick answer
To cite a conference paper in APA 6, include the author(s), year, title, and container or publisher details. A concrete example is below.
Example
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., & Parmar, N. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NeurIPS 2017), 5998–6008.
This example is rendered with the official CSL definition for APA 6. For the exact style required by your journal, paste your references into DEEPNOTIS and pick that style from the dropdown — the app covers 2,800+ variants.
What you need
For a conference paper, APA 6 expects these fields at minimum:
- Author(s)
- Year
- Paper title
- Proceedings / conference name
- Page range
- Publisher or sponsor
Common mistakes
- Using title case for article titles. APA uses sentence case for everything except the journal name.
- Spelling out author first names. APA 7 uses initials (e.g. 'Smith, J.'), not full given names.
- Forgetting the DOI. When a DOI exists, most styles now require it (usually as a full https://doi.org/… URL).
- Inconsistent capitalization. APA uses sentence case for titles; MLA and Chicago use title case. Mixing them is the single most common style error.
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Last updated: 5 May 2026